


The Decent Hem

by MmeBahorel



Category: Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 16:09:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/599659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MmeBahorel/pseuds/MmeBahorel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anthony had only one good memory from his last half at Eton - he had done an excellent job in Vienna of learning to forget the rest.  Why did Oxford have to be the place for it all to return?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Decent Hem

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mikkey_bones](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mikkey_bones/gifts).



> This story forms a pair with Lonely Under Moon and Star. They may be read in any order.

_Desire is a witch / And runs against the clock. / It can unstitch / The decent hem / Where space tacks on to time . . ._ Cecil Day-Lewis

“Freshmen. Freshmen. Everywhere you look, b-b-boys just out of the schoolroom.”

“Is that a complaint?”

“I don't know, my dear,” Anthony said sadly to his companion. “They're all as v-v-virginal as their sisters, and half of them don't know how to bluff it. It's so trying.”

“And Bunny has gone down.”

“I never needed that bitch to choose boys for me,” Anthony snapped. “But I haven't seen one likely lad in all these days.” “All” meaning “two”. “A sad year, this one.”

“You'll find someone interesting. You always do.”

“It took me six months to find you. And Bunny was doing his damnedest to help.”

“You make me sound like one of Bunny Sheridan's leavings.”

“Never. His leavings are only good in Beirut, and only because he's spoiled for choice. One cannot say that of Oxford.”

For two years, Anthony and Bunny had watched the undergraduates arrive and taken stock of the merchandise on offer. Even as a freshman himself, Anthony had already known Bunny, who he was certain had copied his own knowing air derived from a childhood in Biarritz and a youth in Buenos Aires, among other fashionable watering places. After a winter meeting in Davos followed by a summer encounter in Monte Carlo, Anthony's arrival at Oxford had been one of hope and welcome, and he had been immediately absorbed by the associates Bunny had formed the previous year. The whole crew had gone out fishing for freshman the very day Anthony arrived, reassured by Bunny's description of Anthony as an old hand. But now Bunny was in Beirut, all his old set gone down before him, and Anthony was beginning an ambivalent third year. Like his utter failure at Eton, a minimum of three years at Oxford or Cambridge had been decreed in his father's will, so he had no choice in coming up yet again. His mother was not inclined to give him an allowance if he forfeited the very generous one that accompanied his educational expenses, so here he was, forced to stick it out until he reached the independence of twenty-one. But it seemed a very sad year, if he could only count on Sandy Meredith and Puff Robinson for entertainment. Puff appreciated aesthetic entertainments, but he preferred the company of women when it came down to it. All hopes for periodic relief rested on Sandy and trips into London unless some suitable freshmen turned up.

The third evening proved brighter. Walking out to the Mitre for cocktails with Sandy and Puff, Anthony's vision was arrested by the sudden sight of true divinity. “My dears, has my m-m-mortal c-c-coil been left behind somewhere? Do I float freely through the heavens?”

“Where is he?” Sandy asked, trying to cover his excitement. Anthony had seen the boy first, so Anthony must pursue or abandon chase before Sandy would get his chance.

“Looking in the window at Shepherd & Woodward. My dears, angels walk among us.” Quite familiar angels – the beautiful boy's tousled hair and the shape of his nose awoke a strong memory. He distinctly resembled someone Anthony had met before, in very auspicious circumstances, perhaps a bellhop in Los Angeles or London.

The boy turned around, and Anthony's friends had a good look at his face for a moment before he continued on. In that moment, Anthony realised just who the boy must be: no bellhop at all, but Lord Sebastian Flyte. “Oh yes,” Sandy agreed, “an angel indeed. The most beautiful boy I've ever seen in England.”

What was Sebastian doing at Oxford? The most beautiful boy in England, indeed, but why must he be up this year? Why had he come to Oxford at all when he could have been safely lighting up the walks of Cambridge?

“Shall we follow him?” asked Sandy.

Puff rolled his eyes. “You can be thoroughly predatory later. I am desperately in need of a little drinky if I'm to hear the rest of this Cefalu madness.”

“Oh, yes, Cefalu. I _must_ hear more about this black magic.”

Anthony would have been surprised in July if he had been told that the tale of the Cefalu madness would ever be a relief, but he needed to time to consider just how to approach the issue of Sebastian Flyte. Over cocktails in a dark corner of the bar, he explained the ridiculousness of the so-called Abbey of Thelema to which he had been dragged along by the charming son of one of his mother's American friends, seeking the mother among Crowley's acolytes. “The place is t-t-terribly t-t-tiresome. They take it all so seriously, and you cannot believe a _word_ of it. Someone has destroyed the walls with the most gruesome frescos that cannot decide if they are in the Indian or the Greek mode. Perfectly lurid.” 

The trip to Cefalu had been tiresome; he quickly passed on to the greater entertainments of Biarritz that he and Jim Foster had enjoyed after it proved impossible to get Jim's mother out of the Abbey. From Biarritz they had motored up to Pau. “Marc was not there, for once, and it had André _completely_ out of sorts. What good is a genius when he spends half his time m-m-mooning about over a boy who is more kind than interested? He did show us a book he was working at having properly printed about men of _our_ sort. Very scandalous and tremendously interesting. Which is what one expects from André when he is in humour.” He avoided mentioning that his mother and stepfather had really settled down at San Sebastián across the border this time. Anthony hated San Sebastián – his mother never spoke her native Spanish outside of Argentina except when arguing with his late father, when giving instruction to one of the chauffeurs, when making love to his stepfather, or when in residence at San Sebastián. Lulu was perfectly fluent with the Americans and French at Biarritz, but she always managed to sound like the colonial she was at San Sebastián. But these stories of the vac could not quite distract him from the matter at hand. “Do either of you know who that b-b-beautiful b-b-boy was outside Shepherd  & Woodward? I swear he must have put me in mind of a b-b-bellhop from somewhere,” he lied.

Puff laughed. “No idea about the bellhop, my dear, but you've certainly seen him before. Or one like him: his elder brother was in my college and only went down last term.”

“And you never introduced me to that brother?”

“Lord Brideshead wasn't half so pretty as little Sebastian.”

“That's how Sebastian Flyte grew up?” Anthony asked in mock shock. “I assumed nothing so angelic could last. It's been so many years I should never have thought of it. Do you know the family at all?” 

“Just Lord Brideshead to say hello to in the quad. You must be able to find some other Etonians to effect an introduction. If he were following in his brother's footsteps, I'd have seen him earlier.” Puff was a Westminster boy, now attached to Magdalen; Sandy had suffered through Marlborough before matriculating at Christ Church with Anthony and Bunny.

“Then I merely need to find him properly. What does Eton matter now? I was in Venice in September at the same time as the marchioness, you know. Shared some _very_ significant looks with a terribly attractive gondolier over that farce. I am my own introduction.” Sandy and Puff did not need to know just how his previous acquaintance with Sebastian had gone, he decided.

Anthony hoped Sebastian would remember him – surely one could not forget the first. His first had been a decaying Spanish priest in Buenos Aires, not long after his father's death. When instructed to keep the embarrassing fumblings secret, Anthony, who thought someone else's secret was a means of turning everyone's attention to himself, had asked his mother, in family company only thanks to dour Spanish mourning traditions, just what one's prick had to do with one's first communion. After the men were done laughing at the directness with which he had asked such an unimportant question, his mother deigned to give him a proper response. “Priests will be priests,” Lulu said, “and children are not to interrupt adult conversations with lurid tales. If you tell him you don't like it, he'll stop. No one likes a fuss. There will be plenty of time for that in five or ten years, when you are grown up enough to understand it all.” And indeed, by the time Mr Rutherford the mathematics master thought he might make a similar pathetic fumble, Anthony felt sorry for him and went along. He thought it would be an educational experience. Looking back, he did not think himself quite so kind as Marc Allégret, but he had no more love for Clarence Rutherford than Marc had for André Gide. Rutherford was never going to be as useful or as interesting as Gide, but then Marc preferred women, so he was more put out by the affair than Anthony was in his own.

Perhaps Anthony was not Sebastian's first at all. Perhaps there had been a priest for him, too. Or perhaps the memory of the two fumbles they had managed had been eclipsed by someone with the seniority to demand the attentions of the angelic child. Two fumbles in a cupboard when they were supposed to be heading back to schools after confession was hardly the sort of memory one could cherish. But Anthony did cherish it. Sebastian Flyte, eager to please anyone who gave him a scrap of possible affection, was the only good memory Anthony had of Eton. Lulu had put little stock in so many of the old traditions that two years of close mourning in Buenos Aires had been a shock, and he was initially grateful to be sent to school as an excuse to leave the stifling family circle that was his mother's permitted social world as a recent widow. But Eton quickly proved no happy release for him, while she had an excuse to take up residence in London again. Attempting to follow in Shelley's footsteps by refusing to fag for anyone had not gone over well, so he gave in after six months. The war had put most of the older boys into the army class and left only the most ancient masters behind until blind Mr Huxley arrived the same half as Sebastian. A handful of Belgians were nearly the entire Catholic population of the school, led by their crown prince: Anthony and three other Englishmen were as out of place among their religious kindred as they were among their countrymen. Sebastian's arrival had come very late, but it added a new, and beautiful, face to the masses and confessions that for the first time in Anthony's life were required of him. Rutherford had started his advances the previous half and had not forgot them over the summer vac. Anthony had initially conceived the idea of practising on the new boy, but Sebastian had an uncanny way of staying in one's head. It would have become more than practice if the whole fuss with Rutherford had not come out so quickly in the Michaelmas half. 

Yet as biddable as Sebastian had been, Anthony knew nothing of his opinion of those two brief encounters in the cupboard on the way back from confession. Perhaps the interest had been all on Anthony's part. It frequently was. 

It was a surprise to discover at the first formal dinner he bothered to attend that Sebastian Flyte was also a Christ Church man. Anthony had not cared what college took him – he was attached to his allowance, not his formal education. He was glad not to have been relegated to a minor college, but Christ Church in the particular, as opposed to the abstract, had no meaning to him. The evening was reminiscent of Sebastian's first appearance at Eton, at the beginning of Anthony's unfortunate last half, for nearly all heads were turned to watch the beautiful young man. So often, a beautiful child coarsened as he grew, and rarely did he become the beautiful gentleman who now cast a shadow on the rest of the undergraduates.

The approach had to be made publicly, Anthony decided, and one could never acknowledge publicly just what had been done in the cupboard. So how was it to be done? Which party did Sebastian favour? Anthony did not even know that much about him. He had done what talking there was to be done all those years ago, before the Marchmain marriage had collapsed. Society took Lady Marchmain's part, as the farce in Venice had demonstrated so recently, but Lulu knew people who traveled in the same circles as Alex Marchmain and his mistress. Lord Marchmain's ludicrous departure from Lord Malton's yacht had got straight back to Anthony and Lulu the very evening it happened. It would be more interesting, certainly, to approach little Lord Sebastian in the name of his father. But it might backfire terribly, like telling André Gide just how kind Cocteau could be to an interested boy. It was a risk. The English hated risk: they hated it so much that even as half of them hated school, the old school tie was still the only way to introduce oneself. He dared not assume Sebastian would remember him, or even recognise him straight away. He had spent so long making himself up that he was no longer entirely certain just what he had been doing outside of cupboards and Rutherford's room during that last half.

Which would be worse? Anthony asked himself. To say “Hello, Sebastian, how is your charming father? I hear so much about him from my mother's old friend, Señora de Paños”? Or to say, “I say, Lord Sebastian Flyte? I was a couple years ahead of you at Eton”? He could bring himself to do neither. He could never be so English as to use the old school tie, yet he had spent enough time with Englishmen – or inherited just enough circumspection from his father – that he could not bear to cause a beautiful boy social embarrassment. Well, he was his own introduction, as he had told Puff, however it went. He had only to hope that it was as the infamous Anthony Blanche, and not as that Anglo Argentine from Eton, that he was accepted.

“I'm having a little p-p-party in my rooms after dinner on Saturday,” he announced to Sandy. “Let us say six of us. You, Puff, Lord Sebastian Flyte: who else?”

“A party for Lord Sebastian?”

“But of course.”

“Shall we say Fiddian and Williams?”

“Mary Williams is already an obnoxious old queen, and she's barely even twenty.” Michael Williams had, just before the long vac, committed the unpardonable sin of stealing Colin Fiddian out from under Bunny's nose. It was one of the reasons Oxford was going to be such a bore this year – Bunny had gone down and Williams had stayed up.

“Paul Jeffrey, then? He's just back from Weimar.”

“Oh yes, he'll do very well. See that everyone knows. I must introduce myself to the guest of honour.”

“If he doesn't come, I'll find another freshman by then, though I doubt I can find one half so good.”

“He'll come.” No one ever turned down one of Anthony's parties, even if they merely came to gawp.

Sebastian was accompanied by three friends, probably from Eton or perhaps from wherever he kept himself. They looked like utter bores beside the beautiful Sebastian, and Anthony had no qualms ignoring them entirely. “Sebastian Flyte. I should have thought to see you here one of these days. A p-p-pity you weren't in Venice last month. We might have caught up then.” Why he felt as if his entire future hung on his reception tonight, he had no idea. Was he playing the hearty Englishman too much, or was it coming out as the incurable sissy instead?

Sebastian blinked at him. Anthony's experiments with invention at Eton had been a partial receipts only. The heights to which he had now ascended were not then even in his sights. Did Sebastian recognise him? Was he trying to avoid Anthony, wondering why Anthony had put on an antic disposition, or trying to remember where he had met a man of this nature? “You were in Venice?”

“Yes. And that little t-t-tiff between your parents was most amusing. To an observer. Doubtless you are glad to have entirely missed it. It was rather _de trop_ , but that was what made it so amusing. I'm glad to see you've come up to Oxford at last. What do you make of the old p-p-pile?”

“It's rather beautiful, isn't it?” That was rather warmer, or at least more enthusiastic. Sebastian was not trying to brush him off, much to Anthony's relief.

“In its way. Very much _of its t-t-time_ , you know. People say the same of Eton, that p-p-parts of it are very b-b-beautiful. But _of their t-t-time_. Where are they keeping you? I should have picked you out before now if you were in Tom Quad.”

“Meadow Buildings.”

“That is _appalling_.” Unthinkingly, he put a hand to Sebastian's chest, and then realised what a complete sissy he was being. Best not to scare off the boy before it could be determined how much of their brief relationship he wanted to remember. Anthony withdrew the touch immediately, but with a flourish. “Absolutely appalling. An Etonian, the son of a marquis, and in M-m-meadow Buildings? I had thought Peck, perhaps, but my dear, you are in _Siberia_. Never you mind. We shall fix up their mistake. I'm having a little p-p-party on Saturday. After dinner. 8 o'clock or so. You must come. Your mother would _never_ approve, but I do not approve of what she gets up to with Sir Adrian P-p-porson, so I believe we are quits. You will come. Bring your friends.”

Anthony swanned off before Sebastian had a chance to reply. Either his reputation was quite what he believed it was, that someone would immediately ask the boy “what did Anthony Blanche want with you?” and he would have to come, regardless of the memories jogged by that name, or he was not so notable as he wished, or as memorable for the right reasons, and the invitation would be ignored. It was unfortunate that they had never met outside of school before, had not run into each other at the Lido or in any of the other watering places to which Anthony hied himself in the vacations to take advantage of his mother's wide acquaintance. They frequently came across Lord Marchmain, though never quite to speak to. Perhaps Sebastian did fall more to his mother's side, as the rest of the respectable world seemed to do. Had they met again on the Lido, it would have been possible to speak freely from the beginning. But here, Anthony had a reputation to uphold.

“You'll have to leave out Finnian, which is just as well, anyway. Jeffrey must come because I want to hear about his little b-b-boxes. Little Lord Sebastian had three friends with him whom I unfortunately felt compelled to invite, and I cannot have an odd number.”

“What did he say?”

“Hardly anything. I do think I shocked him.” Or confused him. Did Sebastian recognise him or not? Anthony could not be sure. And after all, six years turned a boy into a man, with scholars gowns producing quite a different profile to the Etonian tails. Sebastian, like most in his year, had still been in the short jacket when Anthony left. It was his face and hair that had changed so little. Did it even matter if Sebastian recognised him, in any case? Perhaps it had not been one particular lad but half the school who had taken the boy into bedrooms and cupboards after his unfortunate early departure.

“He may come once to gawp, but he's hardly going to open our set back up if you've frightened him.”

“But the real nobility! We've never had a proper lord. Did I ever tell you there was a real prince at Eton with us? Léopold. _Very_ good looking, I must say. Unfortunate that he c-c-conceived a v-v-vocation, God help him, and bored us to tears confessing that he had nothing to confess. He'd actually been in the war, until his father realised it was a real war and pulled him right out and sent him off to Eton for safekeeping. And there was handsome Léopold, c-c-conceiving a v-v-vocation, when he'd been so carefully preserved for his outmoded little throne. He was a year ahead of me. Such a bore.”

“Well, he was in the war, if only for a bit. They can't help it – the life was sucked out of them. The less said about my brother, the better, and he isn't even off his head. Let us hope Lord Sebastian did not conceive a vocation after fagging for your Prince Léopold.”

“I do wonder if anyone managed to taste that deliciously shaped mouth. Do B-b-belgian princes taste anything like the ch-ch-chocolates? If Eton had promised me such pleasures earlier, I should have contrived not to be sent down so quickly.” He would have preferred half-blind Mr Huxley since he was to have nothing of the heir to the Belgian throne, but Rutherford had been the one offering, so Rutherford it had been.

Sebastian did indeed turn up at Anthony's rooms with his three friends, none too shocked to stay away. “I am so g-g-glad to see you, my dear. You must introduce me to your friends. Please forgive me – the only thing I have to drink at the moment is champagne, and I hadn't intended this to be a celebration of anything. Drink up, dears. Paul! Paolo, darling, you must tell me all about these little b-b-boxes you were b-b-building for us all to live in.”

Jeffrey greeted him with a kiss on the cheek. “You would have loved Germany. You must come back with me over the vac. I was doing no building myself, mind, just seeing what the clever little men were up to. No one has built anything yet, which is a pity, but there is talk that a house may finally be built in Utrecht, of all places, next year. It's not just the houses, Antoine. They believe everything should be redesigned for modern life. The most exquisitely simple door handles are about to be manufactured. A factory has agreed to the production! Just a door handle, and it makes this place look like the decayed Renaissance monstrosity it is. How do you bear living here?”

“Peck is just as grotesque, if not _worse_. I cannot abide the paneling. Come, have you met Lord Sebastian Flyte? We were at Eton together.”

“At the same time, not so much together,” Sebastian tried to correct. Was that how he was going to play it? Was this the public face, or did he prefer to forget that they were together in a rather important way?

“He's a freshman, so do be gentle with him, Paolo.”

The others were introduced – Etonians, as Anthony had feared. He could not place a single one of them, neither by name nor by face. Still, they proved useful in that Jeffrey soon had one of them occupied as they attempted to find family acquaintances, and Sandy pulled the other two into some sort of conversation with Puff so Anthony might have Sebastian alone.

“You don't really know Mummy, do you?” Sebastian asked familiarly, buoying Anthony's hopes. He was known and already accepted as someone with whom one could be on friendly terms. Anthony filled his honoured guest's glass for the second time.

“No. I never said I did. I almost know your father.” 

“No one knows Papa.”

“Patently false. He was on Lord Malton's yacht last month, so Lord Malton certainly knows him. Not that I know Lord Malton personally. My mother was at school with Señora de Paños, and the de Pañoses had a box seat for that little farce. Why weren't you in Venice?”

“I only go when Papa wants to see me.” 

Anthony slowly exhaled. It was an intense relief to learn Sebastian sided with Anthony's sort of people after all. “At intervals when I am not there, it seems. How very sad.”

“It isn't deliberate.”

So he does acknowledge that there could be a reason to keep his distance. “I'm glad you've decided not to cut me.”

“There's nothing to make a fuss over.”

A fuss. Just what Lulu had called it. “Better me than an old Spanish priest?”

Sebastian paused a moment, his head cocked like a bird. “Yes.” But he quickly changed the subject. “You've got lovely rooms.” His eyes went right past Anthony's Klee and settled instead on a Leach vase with two yellow chrysanthemums. “Very lovely.”

“St Ives.”

“Pardon?”

“There's a Jap potter in St Ives, of all places, working with an Englishman to found an art studio. Though I bought this one because it reminds me so much of African masks. Very like what Picasso was doing years ago.”

“Oh. I was admiring your flowers.”

“Admire away. Beautiful things should be admired, whether they were made by man or by nature.”

But it was a party, and Anthony was pulled away to deal with the Etonians, leaving Sebastian suddenly in Sandy's company. Not that Sandy would take a boy from under a man's nose, but Anthony would much have preferred it have been Puff.

He did manage to get Sebastian alone again at the door for a moment. “Have I shocked you? Shall you come back?”

“Perhaps. I shall ask Papa about you.”

“Do. My mother is Mrs Victor Aguirre.” He held back a grimace – he could not mispronounce Victor's name, and he did not particularly wish to be taken for English most of the time, but the rolled “r” marked him as a true foreigner.

“Well?” Puff asked, the visitors safely gone.

“I don't know. Who in hell were the other three?”

“The blond one is Stephen Halkett, eldest son of Sir Peter Halkett. The short one is Viscount Rialton; his father is the Earl of Godolphin.”

“The other one is actually more interesting,” Sandy said. “Jack Pearson. His stepfather is an MP, but he was raised in India until he was shipped back to merry olde England for school.”

“Unfortunate. The English are probably even more English in India. I would give him more credit had he come from Shanghai. How does he fit in with the nobility?”

“Probably the grandson of a baronet. Aren't they all?” Sandy's father was an industrialist.

Anthony sent a jet of smoke toward the ceiling. “His mother's set, not his father's, then, if Venice showed them in their respective elements. We shall have to see.” Perhaps it would be too much to expect a boy of eighteen to defy the marchioness where society at large did not. But he did admit to seeing his father.

“Your boy doesn't seem to fit with them.”

“What precisely are you at?” Jeffrey asked, lighting his cigarette from Anthony's.

“Entertainment.”

“Seduction,” Puff corrected.

“I already seduced him once,” Anthony admitted at last, though he wondered if he should blame it on the champagne. “Without Bunny, and after that disgusting row Williams caused, and with you spending all your time with your historians in Balliol, I need something to do with my luncheons and evenings.”

“You could always study,” Jeffrey laughed. “Take my advice, dear: keep your physical affections abroad. Oxford will send you down almost as quickly as Eton did for corrupting the Marquis of Marchmain's son again.”

“That's not why I was sent down,” Anthony complained. “I had the good taste to be very careful in all my activities, and little Lord Sebastian had the good taste not to squeal. It was not my fault the maths master at 50 lacked the discretion I had at 15.”

“I shan't help you here, but come to Germany with me over the vac. After you've done your family duties, of course.”

Anthony did not see Sebastian again that week, but he heard almost immediately about the teddy bear that had made a public appearance the day after the little party. This was deliberate eccentricity, Anthony decided. The boy had not seemed to need to cling to anything at Eton, so now he must be merely playing at something, perhaps taking the widest possible divergence from his brother. Lord Brideshead had been prematurely aged, so Lord Sebastian was playing at perpetual childhood. “Were the Etonians with him?” he asked Puff, who had been the key witness.

“I cannot say that they are always with him, but they were on this occasion.”

“Eccentricity. How p-p-perfectly English.” Yet it did give Anthony an excuse to go looking at the faux-Venetian pile that was Meadow Building. Siberia, indeed. But Sebastian had the luck to have one of the upper rooms that looked out over the Meadow itself. Of course, high up was where the English kept their children, so perhaps it was fitting.

Sebastian was not alone with his teddy bear, and he greeted Anthony with every sign of good humour “You've come to meet Aloysius, haven't you? I told him he could not come to your party for he had not been invited, and he was very put out. Stephen has been having a very nice chat with him whilst I arrange my flowers. Aloysius is very particular about the flowers, so I must do it myself.”

Halkett took his leave soon, however, having the tact to let them alone. Sebastian was taking his time covering a gothic harmonium in hot house flowers. “I wanted to thank you, privately, for not having said anything about Eton.”

“There's nothing to say. Particularly in front of Aloysius. He is far more corruptible than I am.”

“Was I your first?”

Sebastian looked at him then, very like the wide-eyed child Anthony had lured into a closet six years earlier. “Yes. But you're not the only one.”

“That I am very glad to hear. My aim was never corruption. Confession, perhaps, but not corruption.” Léopold had bored him confessing that he had nothing to confess to the priest. Sebastian had never confessed anything publicly, but he took ages in the confessional. Anthony, however, at Sebastian's first appearance, had made him over into the perfect confessor, the one on which he could demonstrate the feelings he knew he was supposed to confess to a priest he did not want imagining such things. His fumblings were no worse than Rutherford's, and the twice he managed was little comfort once the spotlight of investigation put a shadow on everything else at school. He had done well in Vienna learning to forget everything about the half except for Sebastian.

“Enough in front of Aloysius. Let me send him to bed.”

Yet on his return, the bedroom door safely closed, Anthony had the opportunity to caress that cheek again, Donatello's David grown to Michelangelo's. Sebastian was as tractable as ever, taking every sign of affection as his due. “Shall we start over and forget all about Etonian confessions in broom cupboards?”

“If you like.”

“Have you asked your father about me?”

“Oh, I don't think I will. Papa never says anything nice about anyone in society.”

“And you'd rather hear nice things about me?”

“I'd rather hear nice things about everyone.”

Anthony dared a kiss – nothing too personal, just a soft peck at the temple – but it was enough to push Sebastian away. Perhaps he was not so tractable after all. Very well, Anthony thought, I shall give him some space. He will come, from curiosity. Instead of making himself at home with Sebastian's person, he began examining the sitting room as if he had the right. An odd assemblage – one could always tell the freshmen with artistic pretensions because they never managed to select the good things. The elephant's foot was amusing, considering no Marchmain heir would have ever set foot anywhere an elephant might be found. It could be excused in the Indian's case as a sad little memoir of childhood, but next to the disgusting gothic harmonium, it was grotesque. The harmonium itself was sadly of a part with Meadow Buildings, though it must have been a cast off from the ancestral home. A couple pen and chalk drawings on coloured paper, possibly real, of circus performers. It took Anthony a moment to realise they were signed. “Daumier, really? Are these real?”

Sebastian, busy again with his flowers, shrugged. “Maybe. Probably. Mummy said I could have them. She loves giving little presents.”

Sixty, seventy years out of date, yet they reminded him of one of his mother's paintings. “Picasso was doing something similar when I was a child. Lulu bought one and had it sent home. It was the only good thing in the house in all those months we were stuck there in perpetual Spanish mourning after my father died. Sad little saltimbanques on a background of red.” Why did that angelic face still prompt confessions from him? His presence certainly seemed to cure Anthony of muteness, whatever value his holy namesake had to the dumb girl sixteen hundred years earlier. Anthony had let Jim Foster catch up in his artistic education before catching up with his mother in Cefalu. Perhaps he had seen too many chapels of the quattrocento over the past few months – there was no other reason his thoughts should have run in such a direction. “Of course, Picasso moved on soon after.” As perhaps the Marchmains could not, the dislocation of war setting the marchioness firmly behind the times.

It was a Victorian room in a Victorian building, inhabited by a boy who needed to be rescued from a Victorian upbringing he should never have had. Sebastian's quattrocento looks proved him immortal rather than out of his time, Anthony decided. Brideshead might have been the Victorian; the man-child with the teddy bear could not be. There was no getting him out of Meadows this year, but Anthony could at least provide the needed contrast. “You must come visit me whenever you like, my dear. You and Aloysius. My friends – and myself – are entirely at your disposal. Welcome to Oxford.”

Sebastian did permit him a goodbye kiss. Sad little saltimbanques and a teddy bear: this was not merely English eccentricity but a soul in need. Anthony determined that his good works for the term would consist entirely of reforming the latent Victorian right out of Sebastian Flyte. In effect, it would be as good as removing the latent Victorian from England as a whole, with the possible added benefit of a bit of late night pawing. With such important employment in the offing, who needed Bunny Sheridan?


End file.
